Airtel has plans to bring NB-IoT powered smart meters to 1.3 million homes in Bihar in partnership with Secure Meters.
Bharti Airtel today unveiled its plans of deploying Narrow Band (NB-IoT) smart meters that will soon power around 1.3 million homes in the state of Bihar. The company is working in a partnership with Secure Meters and is the first one in the country to bring Narrow Band smart meters with a fallback option which will work on both 2G and 4G to ensure real-time connectivity and uninterrupted data transfer.
For the uninitiated, NB-IoT is a low-power radio technology developed by 3GPP that can be deployed in a large area and enables a wide variety of IoT devices and services including smart meters.
According to a statement by Airtel, ‘IoT is one of the fastest-growing business segments for Airtel Business. This venture into NB-IoT strengthens our credentials as the largest cellular IoT player in the country and places us firmly as a partner of choice for Discoms looking to invest in smart meters. We look forward to being an active player in India’s energy transition.”’
The technology is compatible with 5G networks and will be first rolled out in North Bihar. The company is also working on an IoT platform called ‘Airtel IoT Hub’, which will be customized to cater to the existing Advance Metering Infrastructure Service Providers (AMISPs), which will make meter deployments easier.
Some other functionalities Airtel plans to offer include customer life cycle management, advanced analytics tools like live session check, real-time data usage and diagnostics.
Source:indianexpress.com